Global Crises, Global Solutions: Why I Think the Copenhagen Consensus is crap in more or less words

On the surface of it, the logic of Bjorn Lomborg's book, the well advertised product of the Copenhagen Consensus, seems sound and pragmatic, even philantrhopical. Lomborg is right, if we fail to prioritize, then resources will inevitably be wasted. The question that must be asked here is what the implications or, even more importantly, assumptions of this simple statement are. This will be discussed in detail later. He is also right that the information and insights that science has provided us with should be utilized as far as possible in addressing the biggest challenges in our world today. In fact, there is a moral aspect to the project which according to the editor is "based on the idea that academic information should be brought to the general public to make a better contribution to democratic decision making. " Whether the approach Lomborg advocates proves conducive to democratic decision making is, however, in doubt.
Lomborg is also very specific about what the book, which follows from the Copenhagen Consensus, aims to do: basically prioritizing the use of developed country money outside the developed world . The chosen issues are ranked based on a cost-benefit analysis. That this choice of ranking method is very significant will be shown in this discussion. Moreover, the problems are not ranked in order of seriousness (however that may be defined) but in descending order of the best opportunities for benefits given the constraint of 50 billion USD in the span of five years, which the book assumes is the realistic time and money frame. It is important to note that were the conditions set by the Copenhagen Consensus, for example, 300 billion USD in fifteen years the results would be very different.

The book also clearly states that the prioritization of solutions was made by economists on a pure economic basis. The argument is that "just as you ask a climatologist about the climate, and a malaria expert about malaria, you ask an economist about prioritization". This holds in the sense that if specialists in the different fields addressed here were to participate in the final ranking, they would necessarily be biased towards their own fields of expertise. Still the choice of economists to the exclusion of all other academic professionals is problematic, and will also be discussed later.

The first issue to explore and attempt to deconstruct is that of the paradigmatic assumptions that were necessary to produce the book. That is to say, what are the assumptions about the world, the methodological preferences that follow from them, and the sociopolitical-historical structure from which they emanate that this book was built on? That such assumptions, preferences and biases will exist is almost always necessary and does not make the work invalid per se, but the existence of such specific lenses of seeing the world must be explicitly acknowledged if the results of the academic endeavor are to be honest or are to have any value in solving actual problems.

That having been said, the book is invaluable in the amount of academic input regarding such central issues. It provides a useful, if incomplete, overview of the debates regarding each problem, and in bringing them together in one volume forces the reader to see how interconnected they are (although the book does not always explicitly discuss the ramifications of this). The book is also clearly structured and well organized, if not as accessible to the general reader as it claims to be due to the amount of jargon and technical information employed. Also, taken separately, each chapter of the book on one of the challenges provides an excellent introduction to the literature review in that field and a summation of the most significant debates as well as important and innovative ideas about tangible solutions and their limitations.

Assumptions, Language and Historical Situation

The book makes little effort to explain its assumptions or leave room for a renegotiation of concepts. This is problematic on many levels. For one thing, the solutions the book proposes are phrased in the same language as the problems which created them. That this may not be the view of the writers is valid and does not lessen the credibility of the work, but the fact that the epistemological basis of the approach and solutions the book proposes are controversial is not even addressed does affect its academic integrity and its value for policy makers. A useful analogy here is that the book seems to start in mid sentence. That is, it assumes the reader knows and is aware of the discourse from which it emanates, and feels no need to qualify its statements, conclusions and supposed declaration of facts as being a continuation of a very particular political and historical discourse, which it undoubtedly is. This discourse is rationalistic, ethnocentric, places a high value on science as objective and value-free, and on facts as independently existing entities. It assumes that the current global capitalist system is "natural", part of a historical continuum, and separable from certain ideological discourses and historical creations and is not embedded in a power structure, to refer to Foucauldian notions of knowledge and power. It presupposes that knowledge and values which were in fact created in a certain part of the world according to certain assumptions and consciousness informed by power dynamics are "universal" and "objective" and applicable regardless of time/space conditions, ignoring its own civilizational heritage.

Not only are they applicable, according to the book's assumptions, but the approaches and solutions are also neutral, ignoring the North-South discrepancy, the individuals and institutions responsible for creating this knowledge and its propagation, and the historical power struggles and structures of domination and subjugation that accompany them. This applies to all sorts of knowledge, but the reason that makes it especially critical in this circumstance and worth pointing out is that the book explicitly purports to create a link between the industrialized and non industrialized world through giving aid in specific ways through creating certain priorities via particular mechanisms and advocating them as rational and correct policy options without in the least acknowledging how this process is also an exercise of power and a representation of a certain created paradigm.

For example, absent from the analysis is the impact of the general imbalance of power between North and South and how this affects the application of solutions created in the global North to be carried out in the global South (if such categories can be said to exist). Also absent is at least a mention of the history of colonialism which previously characterized this relationship and how that history could have participated in the creation of certain problems. Similar omissions include the political and practical problem of foreign aid as a way to solve the grievances of the developing world, or a discussion of non Western perspectives of problems such as malnutrition or education. Also significant is the possibility that problems which seem most devastating to the United Nations or the Copenhagen Consensus may be less important to those directly facing them in comparison to other issues such as foreign domination, political legitimacy, or regional cooperation.

These omissions ignore the createdness of the paradigm from which the book emanates and dehistoricize the approach it takes as though it existed in a vacuum of objectivity and neutrality where object and subject, perception and consciousness, self and other, do not in the least matter. To be clear, it is not that this knowledge is used that is unsettling, but that its nature and the historical context in which it exists is not problematized which is so.

The book says nothing about what the developing world can do for itself, and mentions nothing of the discourses regarding these problems where they actually occur and affect people's day to day lives. It also does not find it relevant to explore the perceived causes of these problems in different discourses and thus reimagines the third world in a way which makes it a passive recipient, an object to be acted upon, incapable of initiative or deprived of local structures and discourses that might in themselves hold solutions. It thus imposes itself on local structures/discourses and distorts them leaving them dependent. This is because local structures of economic systems for example or local discourses regarding what the most important problems are according to indigenous societies, if they do not conform to the assumptions of the rational of the book, are implicitly dismissed as "pre modern" or "backward" as if history was a process of linear "progression" and "improvement" or they are just assumed not to exist.

In "Global Crises, Global Solutions," the specific notions and presuppositions which fall under this critique include the exclusively economic-based (and a very specific economics for that matter) approach to prioritization, and the argument that in order for prioritization to be "rational" it must be based on quantifiable criteria made tangible by a cost benefit analysis method. Likewise, the choice of experts and panelists which are informed by a Western-rational socio-historical discourse and academic profession and the utter reliance on supposed "facts" without acknowledging the value laden and political meanings which accompany them(especially in the final ranking, if not in the challenge chapters) when making choices. Also crucial, is the idea that Western academics have both the right and the responsibility to make these choices for the developing world in an implicit "white man's burden" type scenario.

The book is also very strongly based on placing a high value on rationality. This rationality is defined by placing our faith in facts made useful through economic analysis. Lomborg assumes that unless we prioritize in this way, we are doing nothing but wasting resources, which is irrational. The result is a prioritization which rewards situations which have an easier solution, so to speak, rather than one which focuses on the more "urgent" problems, since urgency cannot be measured in economic terms. Thus rationality here, in a Weberian sense becomes an end in itself, and not a means to an end, resulting in an arguably irrational ranking.

This process results in the marginalization of the part of the world which it purports to help and propagates its image as peripheral and submissive by ignoring the context in which it exists, the history of East-West/North-South relations and interactions as well as the different possible root causes of these problems which are portrayed as "global" but are in fact presented as emanating from the developing world( a very obvious example is the presentation of climate change as a developing world problem, which clearly it is not).

It can thus be argued that this approach to solving these problems is nothing but a propagation of the notions and discourses which created them in the first place. My aim here is not to victimize the developing world; on the contrary it is to allow it some space to behave as an actor outside the paradigm which this book suggests. This is not to say that the paradigm is useless or incorrect, or that it is part of a larger "conspiracy" of sorts, it is only to say that the fact that this approach is in fact only part of a particular perception of how the world functions absolutely must be acknowledged if any useful (and not just circular and technical) debate of its findings is to be possible.

The approach of the book is explicitly exclusively economic, and assumes that the biggest and most daunting challenges of the world can be solved by economic, mathematical methods. That this is a value statement is clear and a justification for this approach (on pragmatic terms) is discussed in Lomborg's introduction. What this actually ignores is the fact that this choice to separate economics as a discipline from the structures within which it exists and to assume that it is possible to utilize it with no reference to its historical context, but even more pressingly, the decision to separate economics from politics(especially in the final ranking), is in itself a political choice. It is a choice which sublimates the political and moral values of the particular economics used. To the extent that it does this, it comes up with portrayals of problems and thus solutions which are only partial, if not misleading.

The Exclusivity of the Economic Approach

This is true of the findings even if the logic of the book were to be accepted as is. For example, the final ranking of the proposals does not include the "costs" of mobilizing the political will necessary to implement them, as if they existed in a vacuum where all that is missing is the financial support or technical know-how for their application. It mistakenly assumes that governments do (or at least should) make the choice to solve particular issues on purely economic grounds, and that their failure in certain instances is due to a flawed utilization of economic knowledge. In fact, the choice of governments to focus, for instance, on education rather than migration issues, is largely political, and has nothing to do with what the rate of return on the different solutions are. Similarly, the choice made in the world's different aid agencies, whether governmental or non governmental, as to how their aid would be best utilized is based on political or moral considerations separate from economic concerns. The book's assumption that the political decision has already been made in favor of its ranking, while explicitly stated, largely misses the biggest part of the problem, which is decidedly political rather than economic. In addition, if this logic were to be carried through to its logical end, then there would be no reason not to assume that the political will existed to divert funds from military spending to poverty reduction for example, if an ideal profit maximizing scenario should be created. It is interesting that many of the authors of the chapters on the different challenges recognize this problem and point out the flaws in the cost benefit approach. None of them, however, go as far as to suggest moving into another discipline in the search for answers, and non object to the methodology and logic of the final ranking.

This representation of the problems of our world as clear cut and easily calculable is misleading, and in this sense economics is at least blinder than politics when it comes to the process of decision making. The book's approach and methodology seems to imply that we can substitute economic analysis for political choice in human societies. It implies that there is no reason for there to be public debate regarding where to spend scarce resources in any given society, because all that is needed is the expertise of professional economists who in this sense can make for us the choice about what kind of world we want to live in. The point is that grounds other than economic cost benefit analysis are made to seem illegitimate as grounds for prioritizing policy issues. It is here that Lomborg's goal of encouraging democratic decision making is brought into doubt. The critique here then is that this uni-disciplinary approach only scratches at the surface and only addresses a narrow portion of the problems. A more holistic approach to the issues involving fields such as politics, anthropology and philosophy, an approach which is inward looking and self evaluating, one which is self aware of its biases and the historicity of its discourse as well as the narrowness of its scope, thus its strengths and weaknesses, is absolutely necessary.

This specifically applies to issues such as governance and corruption, conflict, education and migration which involve not only issues of economics but also of infrastructure and, very significantly, issues of sovereignty, political will, variations in predilections of interest groups and autonomy. Lumping together the developing world as one bloc ignores the specific domestic, regional and international relations conditions which affect the range of policy options available to governments and the preferences informing these decisions. Such preferences are affected by balance of power and security concerns, cultural and religious practices, and even ideological considerations. This should not be dismissed as irrelevant or irrational.

Ignoring Systemic Conditions

The book, especially in its introduction and final ranking, also seems to ignore the state as an institution which makes choices and the interaction of states in a specific system which determines what choices they make. In fact, it imposes an epistemological/ontological violence in the sense that it forces concepts such as "global problems" as well as an abstract "global community" which is supposed to solve these problems (and collectively benefit from this), and assumes the existence of politically neutral aid agencies which are willing to finance these solutions. It thus creates not a nuanced picture of "reality" but an artificial categorization of the world according to which economics can be the master science to answer the world's most pressing human dilemmas. This artificial categorization can be useful as an ideal type to which an infinitely more complex reality can be compared and analyzed, but not as the basis as a useful plan for action. Questions of who benefits, who pays who defines and problems and who decides, are left unanswered.

The solutions proposed usually miss the fact that the sociopolitical infrastructure of the developing world may not have the capacity to apply these solutions for various reasons and are not capable of addressing these conditions as additional costs. The ranking, but usually not the challenge papers, also discounts the interconnectedness of these problems in a larger encompassing structure. This interrelatedness means that a change in the status of one issue, for example HIV rates, necessarily affects all other issues, such as malnutrition or conflict. This means that depending on the order of ranking and the anticipated levels of achievement for each problem, the cost-benefit analysis of every other problem would have to take into account new conditions and the whole ranking would have to be reordered.

In many regards, then, the final ranking does not make sense. This is because the vastly different nature of the problems presented does not allow for their comparison as alternative investment possibilities with comparable rates of return. Conflict prevention thus is not an alternative to battling HIV, but may be a precondition to it. This clearly reveals the difficulty of applying a capitalist business model reliant on rates of return as a criterion to developmental social problems affecting multitudes of human lives

The Experts and the Panel
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Lomborg explains that the experts in the different fields and the panel of economists were chosen solely on the basis of their academic expertise and skill. He dismisses the objection that most of the economists are white, middle class, Western men, basically stating that it is just a fact of life that that is the category in which the experts exist. His offhand dismissal of this as mere coincidence, and his disregard of the implications of who these individuals are, comes to be symptomatic of the book's one-sided approach as a whole. There is an explicit refusal to contextualize, and an attempt to make these issues insignificant in order to portray the orientation of the methodology used as universal and value free.

In fact, not only are the experts almost exclusively from a western economic scientific oriented background, but they are also from a certain subset of this category. That is to say, none of the analyses of the expert panel questioned the usefulness of the current global economic system for a root solution to these problems, or its responsibility for their existence in the first place. That expert economists coming from similar backgrounds that take different approaches to development economics exist is a fact. Even with my limited knowledge of the field, names such as Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen stand out as examples of academics that would have significantly different perspectives on these issues. It is worth asking why economists representing a wider portion of the academic spectrum, even if no other disciplines were to be employed, were not present in the panel. To qualify this objection, it should be made clear that I see no intention on the part of the experts to skew the evidence in a particular way to bolster a certain school of thought in economics. In fact, the analyses of both the experts on the particular issues and the economic panel on the ranking, is informative, serious and academically sophisticated. However, it is the portrayal of these specific views as all there is, to the exclusion of all other perspectives, which cannot be useful for the solution of such devastating and controversial problems and is an exercise of an attempted subjugation of one discourse by another.
The Ranking

Other than the problems of underlying assumptions regarding the cost benefit analysis and ranking, there are also logical problems which make the final list interesting, but less than convincing. For one thing, there are many costs and benefits that remain uncalculated in the final CBA figures used to rate each problem. For example, the obstacles of HIV prevention will include overcoming social stigma regarding certain prevention policies, and will be affected by the general health service infrastructure present in the different countries. The panel explicitly states that it chose to overlook such political and infrastructural costs while acknowledging that they are important.

This, however, seems to put the carriage in front of the horse in the sense that such unquantifiable costs usually prove the most difficult to overcome, since an allocation of a sum of aid money cannot solve them. In deciding not to address problems such as governance and corruption because of the difficulty in calculating costs, the panel presents a list useful only in a fantasy world where governments are cooperative and political and social constraints do not exist. This is part of the bigger problem of focusing on economic analysis to the detriment of other types of knowledge. This is also part of a larger trend in the book which leans towards ignoring political and social actors, including individuals, states and aid organizations, treating the problems as if they were simply malfunctions in a machine which could be treated by technical expertise.

Also, the tax revenues from climate change proposals are calculated as costs, while in fact they constitute revenues to governments which can use them to implement other social welfare policies. Similarly, the lessened costs, for example, to community managed water supply and sanitation due to having made progress in control of HIV/AIDS and malnutrition and hunger (since they come earlier on the list) thus increasing overall community productivity, are not considered. This is an instance of the previously mentioned problem of failing to relate the problems/solution proposals in the final ranking and treating each one in isolation as if any such state of separation existed in reality. A plan of action based on such a list, which is nonetheless a commendable effort, will necessarily be unreliable and cannot stand the test of implementation without other complementary research and policy recommendations.Moreover, the specific chapters on the problems attempt to present an idea of fact based assessment using rigorous economic theory, while a lot of the times (but not always) failing to mention the degree of arbitrariness involved in choosing discount rates which are decisive in whether a particular problem makes it to the list or not. This also applies to the range of factors selected to be quantified and included in the cost benefit analysis as well as the methods chosen to quantify them. That this arbitrariness in selection exists is inevitable, but what is needed is an explicit statement that the authors are aware of these choices and not an attempt to make the analysis seem neutral.

If you haven't read the book, have a look at it, it IS interesting, but unless you're an expert on communicable diseases or the ins and outs of subsidies and trade barriers I personally think the book is too jargon-ridden and technical to be of lay-man use.